Earlier in the month had cheerier news, with various new players announcing their entry into space exploration. Luxembourg and China teamed up in a bid to launch a private mission to fly around the moon, which will be the first of its kind. At the end of September, India joined the “Mars Club” when its Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) probe arrived safely on Mars. And the United Arab Emirates have now started building their first probe destined for Mars, which they hope to launch in 2021.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is planning to make history as well, as it confirmed the primary landing site for Philae, the first ever lander to attempt soft touchdown on a comet. Philae will be released on 12th of November and we will know whether the mission was successful by around 15:30 GMT.

Robocars

SMART-NUS enhanced driverless buggy. The steering wheel has been removed and replaced with an in-vehicle touchscreen for alternate selection of destination. Researchers will shadow the buggy on electric bicycles during the demo.

Japan pushes the robot agenda

When it comes to accepting robots as part of everyday life, Japan certainly is a step ahead of many other countries. This fall, the country’s “robotics evolution” council met for the very first time to discuss how to promote measures to increase the use of robots and related technologies with the goal to make Japan a showcase for service robots by 2020.

Industry News

At your service: OSHbot by Fellows Robot.

Robot assistants aren’t just selling coffee. Fellow Robots, in partnership with Lowes Hardware, launched the OSHbot this October to help assist customers at their Orchard Supply Hardware store in San Jose. OSHbot will help customers search for items and find information about products, and will also help store employees with inventory management.

At the Robobusiness convention in Boston, the winners of Pitchfire were announced, with a Norwegian startup company called NLink taking first prize for their robotic drilling and measuring system for ceiling work. Two other startups from Boston and Helsinki received honourable mentions.

Ada Lovelace Day celebration

This October many celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Although we can’t do justice to the many things that went on during the Ada Lovelace celebrations, we will mention some.

Robohub Birthday

Last but not least, October was also a very special month for us at Robohub, as we celebrated our second birthday. We have come a long way from our humble beginnings and now have over 50,000 unique visitors each month and hundred of robotics experts contributing. We hope to continue on this trajectory with the help of our loyal readers, so to find out how we are doing and how we could improve, we have launched our second annual reader survey, open to all visitors of our site. Your feedback will help us immensely, so if you have a spare minute or two, why not complete the survey and tell us what you think?